Abstract
In 1991, Rodney Glen King was beaten mercilessly by four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers after being stopped for driving while intoxicated, igniting national outrage. Despite the brutality being caught on film by a witness, the police officers were acquitted at trial. Three years later, O.J. Simpson led authorities on a nationally televised low-speed pursuit before his eventual arrest for the suspected murders of his ex-wife and her friend. After his defense team, led by Johnnie Cochran, famously demonstrated that the alleged murder glove did not fit, Simpson was acquitted. In 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson during a confrontation following a suspected convenience store theft in Ferguson, Missouri, despite witness accounts claiming Brown had his hands up in surrender. In each of these high-profile cases, a central question looms large: Were the policing tactics employed against these Black men reasonable?
In his seminal work, Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado compellingly argues that Black Americans are strictly scrutinized from the moment they leave their homes to the moment they return. Through a detailed study of the interactions between Black civilians and law enforcement across the United States, Carbado unveils how the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment over the past five decades has effectively sanctioned racially targeted policing at the expense of Black Americans’ privacy, security, and freedom. To underscore the profound implications of his cultural study of law through the matter of Black lives, this Essay bridges Carbado’s analysis of racialized policing with Toni Morrison’s portrayal of Black life in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, in her acclaimed novel The Bluest Eye, as well as the Author’s own formative experiences in a Black urban neighborhood in the South Bronx during the 1980s and 1990s. The multifaceted dialogue reveals how Black cultural expressions of democratic ideals have historically labored under the hegemony of an anti-Black, White supremacist vision of law and order. As a result, any political project aimed at enhancing democracy and advancing justice in America—especially within the criminal system—must reckon with the indelible influence of racial ideologies and racialized bodies on the cultural production of legal meaning throughout U.S. history.